CV NEWS FEED // During a recent event, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly emphasized that if she is elected to the White House next month, creating a “pathway to citizenship” for migrants will be one of her “priorities.”
Observers pointed out that such a pathway has the potential to allow millions of people who crossed the southern border illegally to eventually have the ability to vote in U.S. elections.
During a Thursday Univision town hall with Latino voters in the battleground state of Nevada, Harris vowed to “do the work of focusing on what we must do to have an orderly and humane pathway to earned citizenship.”
“And one of the biggest problems with failure to have a comprehensive plan for immigration is that we have not given them the pathway to earn their right to citizenship,” she continued. “And that is one of the priorities for me, frankly, in terms of my motivation for what I know we must do.”
Migrants “should not have to live in fear, but should have the ability to be on a pathway to earn their citizenship,” Harris concluded. “So, it is one of my priorities.”
Political commentator Collin Rugg replied to the vice president’s remarks on X (formerly Twitter), “Kamala Harris says her ‘motivation’ is to allow illegal immigrants to become citizens who will then be able to vote.”
Rugg also highlighted the unprecedented number of migrants who have illegally entered the country under the Biden-Harris administration.
During a late September interview with MSNBC, Harris had smililarly stated: “We need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship.”
Critics have long argued that policies creating new pathways to citizenship before securing the border could cause the number of migrants to the country to spiral out of control.
“Congress should not pass legislation to legalize the millions of individuals illegally present in the United States,” wrote The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries in July 2021, shortly after the Biden-Harris administration took office.
“Congress has an obligation to enact and enforce laws that lead to an orderly immigration system for our sovereign nation and for the American people,” Ries continued:
Over the past three decades, any discussion of legislation to give green cards to those here illegally has consistently triggered increases in the number of migrants from Central America, Mexico and elsewhere, inducing them to journey to the United States in the hope of obtaining green cards. Illegal immigration at the border is rising again, as migrants seek to benefit from President Biden’s campaign promise of amnesty.
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“Within just the first few weeks of the new administration, the Border Patrol is reporting more than 3,500 daily encounters, up from around 1,000 a day,” Ries noted at the time. “These are crisis numbers—the very opposite of an orderly immigration system.”
Back in 2010, political scientist and psychoanalyst Stanley Renshon wrote in a piece published by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS):
The United States already has a very open, very accommodating “pathway to citizenship.” It begins with applying for permission to immigrate to the United States and receiving it. Then spending five years in the country without breaking the law and then taking a very basic test of rudimentary English facility, knowledge of American creed and government, and being of sound character which mostly demonstrated by simply keeping out of felonious trouble.
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